Latin LiteratureBy: J. W. (John William) Mackail (1859-1945)

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LATIN LITERATURE

BY

J. W. MACKAIL, Sometime Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford

A history of Latin Literature was to have been written for this series of
Manuals by the late Professor William Sellar. After his death I was
asked, as one of his old pupils, to carry out the work which he had
undertaken; and this book is now offered as a last tribute to the memory
of my dear friend and master. J. W. M.

To the Romans themselves, as they looked back two hundred years later,
the beginnings of a real literature seemed definitely fixed in the
generation which passed between the first and second Punic Wars. The
peace of B.C. 241 closed an epoch throughout which the Roman Republic had
been fighting for an assured place in the group of powers which
controlled the Mediterranean world. This was now gained; and the pressure
of Carthage once removed, Rome was left free to follow the natural
expansion of her colonies and her commerce. Wealth and peace are
comparative terms; it was in such wealth and peace as the cessation of
the long and exhausting war with Carthage brought, that a leisured class
began to form itself at Rome, which not only could take a certain
interest in Greek literature, but felt in an indistinct way that it was
their duty, as representing one of the great civilised powers, to have a
substantial national culture of their own.

That this new Latin literature must be based on that of Greece, went
without saying; it was almost equally inevitable that its earliest forms
should be in the shape of translations from that body of Greek poetry,
epic and dramatic, which had for long established itself through all the
Greek speaking world as a common basis of culture. Latin literature,
though artificial in a fuller sense than that of some other nations, did
not escape the general law of all literatures, that they must begin by
verse before they can go on to prose.

Up to this date, native Latin poetry had been confined, so far as we can
judge, to hymns and ballads, both of a rude nature. Alongside of these
were the popular festival performances, containing the germs of a drama.
If the words of these performances were ever written down (which is
rather more than doubtful), they would help to make the notion of
translating a regular Greek play come more easily... Continue reading book >>